Haunted by Screams (Jeff the Killer)

Chapter 25. Night walk

Happy New Year everyone! 

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As soon as she heard her father close his bedroom door and lay down in his bed she flung up from her own and stumbled ungracefully to her bookshelf. Her heart skipped beats as she desperately tried to find the book she was looking for. It had to be there somewhere. Finally she had it in her sweaty and shaking hands as her breathing was unstable.

"Brothers Grimm's Tales and Stories"

If she was right, then the answer to where Jeff and Jim was should be hidden in this book... On page 97... She paged through the old book quickly and a bit violently and was just at page 82 when - it ended.

"What? No! No!? It can't end there!? No!"

Nora tried desperately to see if pages had been ripped out but there was nothing indicating on it. She'd just simple reached the end of the book. Frustrated she let it fall to the floor as she began sobbing quietly over the fact how stupid and useless she was for not figuring it out. She slumped onto the cold wooden floor as she irritated dried the tears with her hand.

"I'm such an idiot! And I'm so so sorry Jim - If only I knew where you where"

Her gaze fell on the old children's book who was showing a picture of the wolf in 'Little Red riding Hood' trying to fool the girl to leave the path to her grandmother's house and instead wander into the woods.

A wolf.

A dog.

Suddenly it felt as if someone had given her the right answer - the pieces in the puzzle made perfect sense. Of course - she hadn't been as stupid as she thought! I made so much sense now! If Jeff would leave anything telling about his location he would of course do it in a book he'd actually read, not one he'd despised more than anything;

The Call of the Wild!

With beating heart she rose and carefully opened her bedroom door. She crept quietly toward her father's bedroom before opening the door of it carefully. Her father was laying in bed while snoring loudly. He must have been exhausted.

Soon she found what she was looking for lay next to him on the nightstand. It was his favorite after all, and Jeff had known that as-well thus the reason for why he'd left the bloody numbers on one of her father's notes became more than obvious to her. The book was laying next to him, seemingly taunting her with its old pages protected by its shell. She gulped quietly as she crept closer to it, and closer, and closer. Once she was right next to it she grabbed it with sweaty fingers just as her father turned around in his sleep and faced her. She nearly shat herself and gasped by surprise before she managed to stop herself with the palm of her hand. After making sure he was still asleep Nora crept away as quietly as possibly from the nightstand and her father's bed, closed the door carefully behind her before continuing creeping toward her own room.

Finally inside she placed the book on the carpet as she began roughly paging through it. As she was on page 95 shivers ran down her spine as she turned to the next page. There was nothing there - no text scribbled down after, no mark on the page or anything special - only Nothing. Feeling desperate Nora began reading the text on the special page, and by the end of it managed to come across what she knew was the reason to why Jeff'd wanted her to read it.

"Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call...he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest... Thus the rest of mankind was as nothing."

The forest. Jeff must have taken Jim somewhere into the forest, the question now that followed was just: Where?

The thought had struck her several times before that Jeff must be hiding somewhere else when he wasn't at Nora's house. And since Jeff wanted her to go into the woods there must be like an abandoned house or a cabin hiding behind the trees of the dark forest. Nora knew that this could be a long-shot but it was the only clue she had to go on and even if she'd had to search through the entire forest she had to find Jim, that much she owe him for dragging him into this mess of a situation - or rather this Hell of a situation.